UnitedHealth Group Wells Fargo 21st Annual Healthcare Conference

Good morning, everybody. Our presentation today contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of U.S. federal securities laws. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from historical experience or present expectations. A description of certain of these risks and uncertainties can be found in our reports filed from time to time with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including the cautionary statements included in our annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q.

I'll make some very brief comments. We continue our turnaround. I think everybody's been watching us over the last year as a team. Continue to be optimistic about 2026, but probably really more into the velocity that we are seeing going into 2027, and into 2028 as we start preparing for the multi-year outlook. Nothing has changed from our 2Q earnings call. I would say trajectory of things continue to be positive, with Medicare performing better than expected. Medicaid seems to be performing very much in line, and rates seem appropriate that we are receiving, and a little bit of pressure on the commercials we talked about from the IDR process. Optum Health continues to have an incredible turnaround. A lot of wood to still chop, but optimistic about the trajectory that we're on.

Yeah. What I would say though is the trends that we saw happening through Q1, we obviously wanted to see some more development in Q2 to see if those, in fact, were durable. While I won't comment on our Q3 results at this point, I will say that durability has not dissipated, and so we continue to see that similar momentum that we saw coming out of Q2 continue into the last two months.

Yeah. A couple of comments I would make on this. I think probably the most important one was how we repositioned the book coming into this year, and really that positioning in terms of how it impacts us into 2027, into 2028. We really needed to make some tough decisions around the durability of the products we had, coupled with what we thought were sustainable margins over time. As we'd said when we started this year, we thought we would be in the 2%-4% range, but in the upper half of that range is where we thought we could land the plane this year. I would say that what we saw through the first half of the year supported that conclusion.

What we continue to see in the second half, really at this point now is really anchoring on where we fall out on that upper half at this point. But I would say all trends are pointing in the right direction, which also then gives us a lot more opportunity as we think about 2027 and products, and we've rolled those out. We know what we're going to be going in open enrollment with, but as we think about commission strategies, unique investments we can make in Q4 around STARS for our future years, I would say we're positioned well to be able to make those investments.

Yeah. So maybe first on the bids, and I'll ask Krista and Ben to comment a bit as well since they helped support the bid process for us on our broader Medicare book, but also in many ways support the bid of others. As you think about as we approach this upcoming year, we continue to be very respectful of trend. I think it's one of those items, though, that you just cannot ignore the surprises we saw back in 2025. That being said, as many folks know, we had an additional point of pricing for what at the time were a lot of unknowns, right? At the time, there were tariffs that were pushed through. Obviously, those subsequently got overturned. There was a lot of uncertainty around AI and how that may impact the businesses, and the ability for us to adapt quickly to that.

But a lot of that has ultimately stabilized.

The way I would say it is we think we're going to be very competitive in terms of our pricing for next year. We think our benefits will be competitive. A lot of the medicine that we took in benefit redesign was coming into the 2026 year, and we saw that in our CAHPS scores. When you remove benefits and change benefits, it will impact your CAHPS scores. But ultimately, we think it was the right decision. We still have a few markets where we're rightsizing some of the products, but I think we'll be well positioned for 2027. I don't know, Ben or Krista, anything you'd want to add from the Optum side?

I would just say from an Optum Health perspective, we've talked a little bit about this in the past, where we entered the year really Working with all of our payers on a strategic plan to ensure that we're well-positioned for 2027, whether that's benefit design, benefit construct, a PPO, HMO, which markets, what part of our network are we taking risk on, et cetera.